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BRe4 ome B oO 2eveD ’ 
Maynard, Sohn Albert, 1884- 


A survey of Hebrew education 








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Biblical and Oriental Series 


SAMUEL A. B. MERCER, General Editor 


A SURVEY OF HEBREW 
EDUCATION | 


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Af 


“Biblical and Oriental Series 


SAMUEL A. B. MERCER, General Editor 
The object of this Series on the Bible and Oriental 


Civilization is to make the results of expert investi- 
gation accessible to laymen. Sometimes these results 
will be presented in the form of daily readings, and 
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THE Book oF GENEsIS FOR BiBLE CLASSES AND PRI- 
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By Samuel A. B. Mercer (nom ready). 


RELIGIOUS AND Mora. IpDEAs IN BABYLONIA AND As- 
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By Samuel A. B. Mercer (now ready). 


LIFE AND GROWTH OF ISRAEL 
By Samuel A. B, Mercer (now ready). 


TUTANKHAMEN AND EcYPTOLOGY 
By Samuel A. B. Mercer (now ready). 


A Survey or HesBREw EDUCATION 
By John A. Maynard (now ready). 


THE BirtH OF JUDAISM 
By John A. Maynard (in preparation). 


MOREHOUSE PUBLISHING COMPANY 


A SURVEY OF HEBREW 
EDUCATION 


/ BY 
JOHN A“ MAYNARD, Ph.D., D.D., Pd.D. 


Associate Professor of Semitic Languages and the History of Religion in Bryn Mawr 
College ; Fellow of the Society of Oriental Research and Assistant Editor of its 
Journal; Associate Editor of the Anglican Theological Review ; Member 
of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago 


MOREHOUSE PUBLISHING CO. 
MILWAUKEE, WIS. 


A. R. MOWBRAY & CO. 
LONDON 






COPYRIGHT BY ; 
MOREHOUSE PUBLISHING CO. 
1924 





TO 
PROFESSOR H. H. HORNE 
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY 
A TEACHER OF ETHICAL RIGHTEOUSNESS 





CONTENTS 


TS OREW OR UWE errs Ai eho Ee Neem erate ane Gieg 
ERROR ACE tare uiimcenn,) crete te hace run Mortal aber g any 
THE SociAL BACKGROUND IN Its ReLA- 

TION DOs LUD U CATION ain euayaielaioie ve ware 
DUCA TIONAL MAIMS tistiisla aa tala eters 
THp SuBIECTS STUDIED... F260 ee). 
MANS OF “EDUCATION. sie he Woe alee oe 
UW Cd SEAT PSU as TERY arte SANS AP ADAIR atae Uudhy VNR 


TPIT TAS “DRA GUE IVDO! BARS ORR EE Ee UD tae NING OE 


FOREWORD 


This work was offered to the Faculty of Peda- 
gogy of New York University as partial require- 
ment for the degree of Doctor of Pedagogy. With 
the consent of the Dean it is now printed, with 
some alterations made necessary by the progress 
of knowledge. A large number of footnotes have 
been left out, and also a large portion of the bib- 
liography. 

The author wishes to express his thanks to 
Dean Samuel A. B. Mercer for reading his manu- 
script in proof, and for making valuable sug- 
gestions. 

I take great pleasure in dedicating this book 
to Dr. H. H. Horne, professor of the History of 
Education and of the History of Philosophy in 
York University, as a small token of thanks for 
what he has done for me, not only as a teacher, 
but as a fearless champion of Truth. 

J. A.M. 


PREFACE 


The highest purpose of education is the forma- 
tion of character, since conduct is, as Matthew 
Arnold said, three fourths of life. Great is, there- 
fore, our debt to the Herbartians for their em- 
phasis on the importance of ethical values. 
Through them it has come to be accepted that no 
educational system is valid which fails to 
build up character. The idea itself is not new. 
For many centuries most civilized peoples have 
accepted it, and they also have agreed that this 
aim was best attained through instruction based 
on ancient Hebrew ideals, as interpreted by 
Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. Even Socialism, 
in spite of its common hostility towards the 
Churches, owes an immense debt to Israel. Its 
roots are found in the teaching of the prophets, 
as can be seen by even a casual study of such 
books as the Sociological Study of the Bible, by 
Wallis, The Social Institutions and Ideals of the 
Bible, by Soares, The Social Teachings of the 
Prophets and Jesus, by Kent. One may or may 
not like the materialistic aspect of what may be 
called the various dogmatic forms of socialism; 
nevertheless this element is also found in Hebrew 


x A Rees of Hebrew Education 


culture and it is not mere accident that it has 
been very attractive to modern Jews. 


Our educational ways owe much to the East,’ 
either by way of direct imitation, or through 
Greek culture, which was greatly influenced by 
Persian civilization and later, in the days of 
Alexander’s successors, by the culture of the con- 
quered East. This debt is, however, small com- 
pared with what has been borrowed by us from 
the little nation of Israel.’ 


The importance of a study of Hebrew educa- 
tional ideals has been acknowledged by every 
historian of education.* They have frequently ex- 
pressed the opinion that if ever a people has 
demonstrated the power of Education, it is the 
people of Israel. The historico-philosophical im- 
portance of the subject from this point of view 
is well illustrated by K. A. Schmid, who looked 
upon Hebrew education as the climax of ancient 
education. 


And yet, in spite of many enthusiastic claims 
or much polite interest, the subject has been so 
imperfectly threshed out in special monographs, 


1See the admirable synopsis of O. Willmann in Orientali- 
sches Brziehungs und Bildungswesen in Rein’s Encyklopaedisches 
Handbuch der Paedagogik, 2nd. ed. 408-414. 

2J. A. Maynard. The Problem of the Formation of Character 
in the Light of the History of Hebrew Education, Anglican 
Theol. Rev. III, 228ff. 


3 Monroe had omitted it in his Text book on the History of 
Education, 1906, but made up for it to some extent in his Brief 
Course in the History of Education, 1907. 


4K. A. Schmid, Geschichte der Erziehung, pp. 11-14. 


Preface x1 


that the main issues have remained obscure to 
most historians; indeed, some of the current text 
books of History of Education betray in places 
an imperfect state of knowledge of the subject, 
and even gross errors, both in details’ and per- 
spective. Too often their authors look at every 
question from a dogmatic point of view, whether 
philosophical, like Davidson, or religious, like 
McCormick. Sometimes they blindly and uncrit- 
ically accept data offered by badly chosen second- 
hand authorities. Others, like Laurie, entertain 
a pious reverence for the results of the crude 
Bible criticism of fifteen centuries ago. We 
should not be too hard on writers of text books. 
In the nature of the case, they have to use the 
works of investigators who are supposed to have 
a first-hand knowledge of the subject but are not 
always very thorough. About this latter, Kennedy 
wrote nineteen years ago, “A critical history of 
Hebrew Education is still a desideratum.’” Two 
years later, in an excellent but brief article on 
the Origin and Development of Jewish Educa- 
tion, G. Harold Ellis made the following state- 

5 Graves, for instance, tells us (History of Education, 130) 
that there was a mnemotechnic method called the athbash; 
what he describes under that name is the alphabetical order of 
lines or strophes in a poem. We do not know where Graves 
found this piece of garbled information. The athbash itself 
was a method of transposition of letters, a kind of code used 
later for exegetical purposes by the kabbalists; it consisted in 
substituting the last letter of the alphabet (th) for the first 
(a), the next to the last (sh) for the sencond (b), etc. The 
earliest instances of it is the writing Sheshak for Babel, found 


in Jer. 25:26 and 51: 41. 
® Hastings, Dict. of the Bible, 1900:1, 651. 


xil A Survey of Hebrew Education 


ment, “Many works on Jewish Education have 
failed to give a correct view of the matter, be- 
cause the relation of history to the mental de- 
velopment of the people was not recognized, or 
because the arrangement of historical material 
was made from an a priori dogmatic point of view. 
An enormous literature on Jewish education has 
grown up, but the lack of scientific accuracy has 
made it almost worthless.’” Since then two mon- 
ographs have given us a more thorough treatment 
of the subject, namely Klostermann’s and F. H. 
Swift’s. But Klostermann is not aware of the 
requirements of educational history, and, more- 
over, is not interested in the whole field. As for 
Swift, he seems to have accepted a number of 
data at their face-value and to have treated the 
critical position uncritically. There is also a 
monograph by Kretzmann but it is of little value. 

The fact that the history of Jewish Education 
has attracted many Jewish investigators has 
caused great misunderstanding of its general 
character. It is very difficult for a talmudist to 
read the Old Testament as if it were not a Jewish 
book, unless he has had a thorough training in 
literary criticism. For this reason there has been 
a general impression that Hebrew and Jewish 
are practically identical terms. We, on the con- 
trary, wish to lay stress on the point that Jewish 
education is not Hebrew education, but only its 
later phase. Indeed, the history of Israel tells us 


7 Pedag. Seminary 9, 1902, 52. 


Preface Xili 


of tremendous changes caused by political and 
social cataclysms. Palestine was like a corridor 
between two continents, and between the two old- 
est civilizations of the Near East; the Hebrews 
were trampled upon by many conquerors; their 
race made rich through tragic national expe- 
riences. We may transpose into their history, 
Jacotot’s famous axiom, “7J'out est dans tout,” in 
so far that the whole history of mankind can be 
interwoven with that of Israel. Even the portion 
covered by our study, namely 2500 to 300 B. C., 
includes several stages in human civilization, 
The clear distinction that we must make between 
Hebrew and Jewish history is, of course, more 
pedagogical than real. One cannot say that, on 
such and such a date, the Jewish race, the Jew- 
ish nation, the Jewish religion began. And yet 
Josephus tells us that the Hebrews “have been 
called Jews from the day that they came up from 
Babylon, after the tribe of Judah, which came 
first to those places, and so both they and the 
country gained that appelation.’” This statement 
is substantially true. In preéxilic times, the term 
Jew designated only a subject of the kingdom of 
Judah. In post-exilic times, the name was applied 
primarily to the Hebrews of the little Persian 
province of Judah, then to citizens of the Macca- 
bean state, and, in a broader sense, to the mem- 
bers of the Jewish race, at home or in the 
Diaspora. Until the days of Ezra there was no 


§ Josephus, Antig. 9, 5, 7, Cf. Contra Ap. 1, 22. 


X1V A Survey of Hebrew Education 


Judaism proper. The papyri of Elephantine show 
us that, in the Fifth Century, the popular re- 
ligion which was polytheistic, was still followed 
by the generality of the people.’ If this distine- 
tion, commonly made by scholars, between the 
old Hebrew religion and Judaism is essential for 
the student of religion, it is no less important 
for the historian of education. The triumph of 
the new religion over the old took place at a time 
when Hebrew ceased to be a commonly spoken 
language, Aramaic having taken its place among 
the people. It is true that formal education be- 
came more prevalent at the same time, but it was 
education in a dead language, with methods 
strangely similar to those of our own medieval 
schools, petrified, bookish, and conservative. It 
would not be quite proper to think of the Heder 
so well described by Cohen” as symbolical of the 
darkness of the new education; there was no 
Ghetto and no Heder in Palestine, but there 
came into Hebrew life and education a rigidity 
and stiffness that killed it. We may admire the 
industry of the pupils who sat at the feet of the 
rabbis, but the methods through which their in- 
telligence was sharpened have only an historical, 
not a vital, value for us. Like the old Hebrew re- 
ligion ancient Hebrew education is part of our 
universal inheritance, for, whether we be fol- 
lowers of Christ, of Mohammed, or of the great 

%J. M. Powis Smith, A. Journ. of Sem. Lang. 1917, 30, 
322-323, 


10 Cohen, Jewish Life in Modern Times, p. 233. 


Preface XV 


Talmudic teachers, Jerusalem is the mother of 
us all. The new religion, as well as Jewish educa- 
tion which was so closely connected with it, is 
dear to a few only; it inspires them, and we re- 
spect it for their sake; but it does not belong to 
the world.” One may perhaps claim that, while 
Hebrew education belongs to antiquity, Jewish 
education should be studied in connection with 
the Middle Ages. No doubt the distinction we 
make here between Hebrew and Jewish education 
was known to historians of education; but, as 
they do not make it clear to their readers, we 
have a right to suppose that it was not altogether 
plain to them, and to take it as our duty to in- 
sist upon it. 

It is rather striking that historians of educa- 
tion who have dealt with our subject at any 
length, have done so because they have uncriti- 
cally accepted, at its face value, a very doubtful 
Talmudic statement. We are told in the Jeru- 
salem Talmud that the famous scribe Simon-ben- 
Shetah, brother of Queen Alexandra, the Brutus 
of the Jews, enacted a law making general edu- 
cation compulsory. The text runs thus: “that 
the children shall attend the (elementary) 
school.” This, however, may be interpreted as 
meaning that attendance on schools already ex- 
isting was henceforth to be compulsory.” More- 


J. A. Maynard, Three Daughters of Israel, Angl. Theol. 
Rev. 1919, 227-230. 

12 Kethuboth 8, 11, 32 b. 

43 Kennedy in Hastings’ D.B. 1, 649 b. 


XVI A Survey of Hebrew Education 


over, fact and fancy have a way of mixing in the 
Iuast; there is on the subject of education so 
much Talmudic material that has been dis- 
counted,” that one should take the story relating 
to Simon-ben-Shetah cum grano salis. As a mat- 
ter of fact, the triumph of legalism in Israel did 
not bring education to all; it created a learned 
class which despised those who did not know 
their letters, the am haarets, to which the epithet 
of sinners was lavishly applied at the beginning 
of our era. 

We thought it needless to give in our bib- 
liography a list of books bearing on Biblical 
science proper. The reader can consult the criti- 
cal bibliographies by Ackerman,” Mercer,” and 
Maynard.” The whole critical position is in a 
healthy state of fluidity; books written on the 
Near East age rapidly. There is, apparently, to- 
day a tendency to doubt the infallibility of a 
purely literary criticism of documents. The con- 
servative position, even as modified by most con- 
tributors to Orr’s International Standard Bible 
Encyclopedia cannot be defended on purely scien- 


144 Schmid calls attention, in his Geschichte der Hrziehung, 
p. 332, to a statement made to the effect that in the little 
town of Bethar there were 400 schools, having each 400 
teachers, who supervised 400 pupils each. If mathematical 
accuracy had not been hampered so much by the cumbrous nu- 
merical notation of the Jews, they would have discovered that 
the cube of 400 is 64,000,000, thus giving Bethar a scholastic 
population superior to that of Europe. 

% Angl. Theol. Rev. 1, 214-239, 314-333; 2. 43-70. 

16 Journal of the Soc. of Or. Res. 3, 19-35; 6, 134-152. 

7 Angl. Theol. Rev. 1924. 


Preface XVII 


tific lines. It does not follow that we must adopt 
in toto the “critical” position as crystallized for 
the English reading public in Hastings’ Diction- 
ary of the Bible, Kent’s books, and the Century 
Bible, and the newly reédited Cambridge Bible 
for Schools and Colleges. That, of course, would 
be an easy way; we doubt whether it would be 
the right way. In common with many others the 
writer has often expressed his doubt as to the 
basic value of the “documentary hypothesis” ; 
more especially the discovery of Deuteronomy in 
the time of Josiah. 

It would therefore be unwise from his point of 
view merely to pigeon-hole every text of the Bible 
bearing on education, according to the periods de- 
termined by orthodox academic criticism. There 
are in the Sacerdotal documents elements older 
than in the prophetic stories called J and E, and, 
of course, than D. The mistake made by Well- 
hausen was to schematize overmuch the evolution 
of Israel. Lammens shows us from time to time 
that Wellhausen did not know his ancient Arabia 
as well as he was supposed to know it. We are all 
aware of his lack of familiarity with Babylonian 
culture. Our own lack of faith in Wellhausen’s 
scheme, as commonly taught, is probably the 
reason why we publish this work on Hebrew 
Education only a few years after F. H. Swift 
wrote his Education in Ancient Israel to 70 A.D. 
Our own work had been finished before we 
learned of his. It was presented in 1919 to the 


XVill A Survey of Hebrew Education 


faculty of the School of Pedagogy of New York 
University, for the degree of Doctor of Pedagogy, 
before we were able to make of Swift’s work 
more than a cursory study. The years that have 
passed since that day have increased our con- 
viction that a more elastic method than Swift’s 
remained preferable. With the permission of the 
Dean of the faculty of the School of Pedagogy of 
New York University, we revised it to bring it 
into harmony with the results of Biblical re- 
search since 1919. 


Our source book has, of course, been the He- 
brew Masoretic Text, although we tried when it 
was necessary to scan the older text that under- 
lies it. The translations given in the following 
pages are usually our own. Whenever they are 
not, we give due credit to the translator we fol- 
lowed because it was evident that his work could 
not be improved. 


Our source material is not altogether limited 
to those parts of the Old Testament which took 
shape in a written form or orally before the birth 
of legalism in Israel. In our times the stones 
have spoken and, still more, the clay of Baby- 
lonia; they have told us little about education in 
Palestine proper, but they have given us a first- 
hand knowledge of the Assyro-Babylonian edu- 
cation. Moreover, the events here studied took 
place in what was called until yesterday, the 
Unchangeable East. Anyone working on our sub- 
ject should not only, as it were, use mentally 


Preface XIX 


pen and ink, but feel that he has at hand a brush 
and a palette furnished with pigments brought 
from the gorgeous East. We only wish we could 
have made better use of them. We have often 
read the second chapter of Lane’s Manners and 
Customs of the Modern Lgyptians, and his 
twenty-fourth note to the fourth chapter of his 
translation of the Arabian Nights. They were to 
us reminders of things seen in our younger days 
when we lived more closely in touch with Old 
Testament conditions and were less distant from 
Semitic folk-ways. A genius looks much like other 
men, eats and sleeps, lives and dies, like the 
common people. So Israel was undistinguishable 
among many nations of the Near East except by 
a collective genius for education of character 
and a hold upon real values. He will remain a 
genius for us even though we study his pedigree 
and his habits. 


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A Survey of Hebrew Educat 


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CHAPTER I. 


THE SOCIAL BACKGROUND IN ITS RELATION 
TO EDUCATION 


The two greatest political events in the history 
of the Hebrews are, first, the Exodus, together 
with the Conquest of Caanan, and, second, the 
Exile, together with the return of part of the 
Judean community to the country surrounding 
Jerusalem. We can therefore roughly divide He- 
brew history into three periods: 


1st, to 1200 B. C. (Conquest of Caanan) ; 
2d, from 1200 B. C. to 586 (fall of Jerusalem) ; 
3d, post exilic. 


The first period is known to us mostly through 
legends; the Hebrews were nomads or semi-no- 
mads. They lived under conditions similar to 
those of the Bedouin of today. We need not 
dwell on these features of Hebrew life. The lit- 
erature on the subject is immense and very cap- 
tivating. Among the nomads, the political and 
social unit is the clan, and that may be very 
small. The power of the chief of the tribe is lim- 
ited; he is a true patriarch. Property consists 


fs A Survey of Hebrew Education 


mostly of cattle. Most nomads cultivate patches 
of ground, when they have the chance to do so, 
and grow on it barley and other grains. They 
wear homespun, and their horses are unshod. 
There are among them a few workers in wood 
and metal; who often are members of a special 
tribe and follow a gypsy-like existence.’ Although 
the nomads care little for books, both men and 
women love poetry and compose it freely. 

Their religion is not very positive; the field 
for ethics is limited to the tribe; the stranger is 
the enemy unless he claims the rights of a guest, 
which, of course, are sacred. 

Some of the Hebrew nomads went to Egypt 
and came out of it under the guidance of Moses. 
They were not very numerous, a few thousand 
at the most. Their conquest of Canaan was like 
an infiltration; even more so than the conquests 
of North Africa and Spain by the Moslems in the 
Seventh and Eighth Centuries; the conquerors 
were a minority; they learned from the con- 
quered as much as they taught them for we must 
not suppose for one moment that the Hebrew in- 
vaders destroyed the remarkable culture of Ca- 
naan. The social life of the Hebrews became more 
complex. They learned to live in houses and to 
cultivate the olive tree and the vine. The clan 


1For instance, the Solubba, or Sleyb, of Arabia, described 
by Doughty, Arabia Deserta, I, 280 ff.. and the nomadic Jews of 
North Africa called Bahuzim, who even today are the smiths 
and weavers of desert tribes. N. Sloutschz, Les hebreo-pheni- 
ciens, Archives Marocaines, XIV, 69. 


The Social Background 3 


ceased to be the social unit; the family took its 
place. Codes became necessary as they do in con- 
flicts of cultures; individual ownership of land 
fostered sharper social differences. The informal 
vague, and non-sacerdotal religion of the desert 
grew more complex; the levitical priesthood as- 
sumed more importance. Slowly Israel was evolv- 
ing towards a monarchy, with a small standing 
army, taxation, class distinctions, foreign poli- 
tics, foreign trade. The writing ot letters, the 
drafting of contract, business agreements, bills, 
inventories, the census, made the scribes more 
and more indispensable. These had nothing to do, 
as yet, with sacerdotal traditions, which contin- 
ued to be transmitted by word of mouth; at 
times, songs of the past were written lest they 
should be forgotten. Men began also to write an- 
nals. The times of Solomon were the Siecle de 
Louis XIV, with limitations, of that period. 
Then came the great trials of Israel, when the 
heavy legions of Assyria spread over the Near 
Kast, slaughtering, looting, burning, veritable 
Huns of that time, sharp, ferocious with efficient 
frightfulness. In Israel, great leaders arose, zeal- 
ously preaching ideals of righteousness; later 
times misunderstood these prophets, but enough 
remains of their addresses to show us that greater 
men than Savonarola were in Israel, men of 
faith and of a clear mind, who have given to 
the civilized world the best of the social ideals 
existing this day and, through doubts created by 


4 A Survey of Hebrew Education 


national despair, kept faith in the righteousness 
of the true God alive for the world. 

The Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, honest 
and pious, completely destroyed Jerusalem, leav- 
ing only, in devastated Judea, the poorest of the 
people. The most industrious were taken over to 
Babylonia. It was the beginning of the Exile of 
Israel, an exile that never ended altogether. The 
exiles did very well in the fertile and prosperous 
country of the Kuphrates. When Cyrus gave them 
permission to return to their home-land, many 
of the Jews of Babylonia chose to remain in the 
land of their birth. Zerubbabel, Nehemiah, Ezra, 
these leaders of the Zionism of the day, were fol- 
lowed by a part of their fellow countrymen, prob- 
ably the worst and the best, the shiftless and the 
devout, as happens in every movement of that 
sort. They found in the old land a struggling 
Hebrew community, which perhaps did not wel- 
come these brothers very warmly. We know very 
little about that period. What seems certain, and 
is very important for our particular point of 
view, is that there arose a tendency to revere the 
written word, “the roll of the book.” The sacer- 
dotal Code was compiled and incorporated into 
a new history of Israel. The sayings of the proph- 
ets were edited and collected. The Hebrew lan- 
guage was rarely spoken at home. Children 
learned it now at school from the newly pub- 

2J. A. Maynard, The Home of the Second Isaiah, Journal of 


Biblical Literature, 36 (1917), 214 ff.; Buttenweiser, Where did 
Deutero-Isaiah live?, Journal of Biblical Lit., 88 (1919), 94 ff. 


The Social Background 5 


lished ancient laws and records. Hence the 
growth of a school system. The Jews became more 
and more a race of traders, imitating their former 
masters, the Babylonians. They saw little good 
in the sister tribes of the desert, the rustic Edom 
and Moab, which still represented the former 
stage of Hebrew culture exalted by the prophets 
of the Eighth and Seventh Centuries. The new 
religion, that is, the reformed faith, had the vig- 
our, the conviction, the narrowness, the feeling 
of superiority, the missionary zeal of a typical 
sect. Israel which was polytheistic in the Fifth 
Century, became now so thoroughly monotheistic 
that it seemed to forget that it had ever been 
anything else. The leaders of the people were the 
teachers, the rabbis, the learned men, scribes, or 
lawyers. It was a most interesting period in the 
history of human thought. From our point of 
view, it was a time of transition, the real begin- 
ning of formal education among the remnant of 
Israel, the Jews. 


3J. M. P. Smith, Am. Jour. of Sem. Lang., 338, 322-333. 


CHAPTER II. 


EDUCATIONAL AIMS 


Modern educators have analyzed educational 
aims more than the Hebrews ever dreamt of do- 
ing. The aims of education are, according to 
Thorndike, happiness, utility, service, morality, 
complete living or the perfection of all of each 
man’s powers, natural development, knowledge, 
discipline, culture, skill.” One could find in He- 
brew writings statements showing these aims 
were known to Israel; but it would be difficult 
to find words that could adequately render most 
of them. There was not even a word for con- 
science. Morality was only true holiness as the 
prophets understood it. The summum bonum— 
which is, after all, the aim of education—con- 
sisted of happiness, goodness of character, and 
fellowship with God. But these were not separate 
aims, they overlapped, or rather they were part 
of a comprehensive aim, that of righteousness. 
The ideal of happiness was a state of rectitude, 
justice, and integrity. The opening words of Ps. 


1 Thorndike, Hducation 1, p. 18. 


. 


Educational Aims 7 


119 tell us of “the happiness of those whose way 
is perfect.” They have found the way of life, not 
a vague, evanescent, mystical conception of it, 
but a concrete, well defined, visible blessing. We 
read in the Proverbs > 


“Happy the man who finds Wisdom, 

The man who gains Understanding ; 

It is better to acquire her than to acquire silver ; 
She gives a better profit than gold. 


She is more precious than red coral, 
No treasures can compare with her. 
Length of days is in her right hand, 
Riches and honor in her left. 


“Her ways are ways of pleasantness. 

All her paths are peace; 

She is a tree of life to those who grasp her, 
Happy are they who hold her fast.” 


We find the same ideal of a long and peaceful 
life in the opening lines of the same chapter; 


“My sons, forget not my instruction. 
Keep my commandments in thy heart; 
For length of days and years of life 
And peace will they heap on thee.” 


and again (Prov. 3: 21-22 


“My son, keep sagacity and discretion. 
Let them not depart from thine eyes. 
They shall be life to thy soul 

And beauty to thy neck.” 





2Proy. 3:13-18. This translation, and many of the follow- 
ing, is based on Toy’s Commentary on the Book of Proverbs. 


8 A Survey of Hebrew Education 


The comparison is obvious. Again (Prov. 4: 
LOLS) 12 


“Listen my son, take up my words 

And the years of thy life shall be many. 
Hold fast the instruction, let it not slip. 
Keep it: it is thy life.” 


Again (Prov. 4: 20-23) : 


ee 


My son, attend to my sayings; 

To my words lend thine ear: 

Let them not depart from thine eyes; 
Keep them in thy heart.” 


Here, aS in many other places, heart means 
mind, and should probably be so translated. The 
text continues: 


“Hor they are life to those that find them, 

And health to their whole body. 

With all diligence guard they heart (or mind), 
For from it is the realm of life.” 


The last line is literally, “from it are the issues 
of life’; we base our translation on the meaning 
“border, boundary” of the word “issue” in Ez. 
48:30. Wisdom says to men (Prov. 8: 385-86): 

“Who finds me finds life 

And obtains pleasant favour from the Lord; 


Who misses wrongs his soul (or self): 
All who hate me love death.” 


The same idea occurs several times more in the 
Proverbs ;* it was no new idea in Israel, and had 


Provo SL GeO sue ee onl aoe 


Educational Aims 9 


very early been added as a corollary to one of 
the commandments in the Decalogue: “Honor 
thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be 
long.” It was commonly thought that a long life 
was the greatest blessing because there was no 
belief in a hereafter, or rather because life after 
death was then supposed to be a_ shadowy, 
scarcely real existence in the dark world of the 
departed. 

A man’s life was perpetuated by his children ; 
this happiness could not be understood without 
a large family. The short psalm, 127, vv. 3-5, the 
nucleus of our present Psalm 127, says: 


“Yea! an inheritance of Yahweh is the reward of the 
fruit of the womb, 

As arrows in the hand of a warrior, so are the sons 
born in one’s youth; 

Happy he who has filled his quiver with them! 

He shall not be put to shame, when he speaks with 
enemies in the gate.” 


We find the same idea in Psalm 128, of which 
we quote a portion: 
“Thy wife shall be as fruitful as a vine in the inner 
court of thy house! 
Thy sons as young olive plants round about thy table. 


Yea! Verily thus shall the man that feareth Yahweh 
be blessed.” 


This intimate connection between God, right- 
eousness, and the joyful acceptance of family re- 
sponsibilities, gave to Hebrew education its pe- 
culiar character. We hear much today from some 


10 A Survey of Hebrew Education 


advocates of education and moral reform of “the 
holiness of generation,’* and it is perhaps well 
we should, but the Hebrews, and the whole East 
knew all that. The Hebrew idea of marriage may 
not be above criticism. It was a Semitic ideal, of 
course, and as such, scarcely did justice to wo- 
men’s abilities and to some of their potential- 
ities. The Hebrew was no feminist, far less so 
than peoples who gave him most of his civiliza- 
tion, namely the Sumerians and the Egyptians. 
Therefore he set many limitations on women, but 
he honoured them to the utmost as mothers. In 
deed, all Semites have done the same. That truest 
Semite of all, Mohammed, the prophet of Arabia, 
said that Paradise is at the foot of mothers. The 
whole East thinks so today, except where civi- 
lization has done its deadly work of destruction. 

The women of the East were not conscious of 
the beauty of this ideal; they married because 
they must. Rabindranath Tagore says, in the 
Crescent Moon, 

““*Where have I come from, where did you pick 

me up’—the baby asked its mother.—She an- 


swered, ‘You were hidden in my heart as its 
desire, my darling.’ ”’ 


Such was the Hebrew mother, and we may 
well envy her today. The Hebrew view of mar- 
riage, and of its primary aim, made moral and 
social education easier, loftier, and simpler. The 


4K. Key, Century of the Child, p. 3, 8. Love and Marriage, 
passim, 


Educational Aims 11 


Hebrews were not perhaps as modest in their lan- 
guage as the Anglo-Saxons of today; although 
they were not worse than the latter a century or 
two ago; their boys ripened early and needed 
sound advice on sexual life, such as was given 
later in Proverbs 5: 3-21; we may call their mar- 
riage songs risqué, as they have been partly pre- 
served in the Song of Solomon; it remains true 
that they succeeded, where we have often failed, 
in the teaching and practice of social purity. 
There, owing to the Hebrew idea of marriage 
and of family life so closely connected with the 
building up of character, Jerusalem of old stands 
far above Athens and Rome. The Hebrew proph- 
ets had nothing to do with deliquescent ethics, 
and the Hebrew sages were impatient of moral 
rottenness. No wonder the nation was able to 
abide through tribulations which would have de- 
stroyed any other racial group. Moral germ plasm 
makes for power of resistance against destruc- 
tion. 

Late in the third period, a high form of hap- 
‘piness is described which consists in meditating 
on the Thorah, the character of the righteous be- 
ing compared to the straight palm tree, which 
was also the symbol of life. Blessed is the right- 
eous man for 


“In the Law of Yahweh is his delight 
And in his law he studies day and night.’ 





DiPaeeis 2) Cte sosephus, \Antig., LV, 8, 12: 


12 A Survey of Hebrew Education 


The motto of the Book of Proverbs is quite 
similar: 


“The fear of Yahweh is the beginning of knowledge; 
Fools despise wisdom and knowledge.” 


This great aim of education is explained at 
length in the same collection, at the time when 
the book itself was written: 

“That men may acquire wisdom and training, 

May understand rational discourse, 

May receive training in wise conduct— 

In justice and probity and rectitude 

That discretion may be given to the inexperienced, 

To the youth knowledge and insight.’’’ 


Although the name of God, and the idea of 
piety recurs often in these texts, we must bear 
in mind that theirs was not a speculative relig- 
ion but rather a healthy, practical, and matter of 
fact view: of God and the world. It is not alto- 
gether true, as some have said, that Hebrew psy- 
chology was primitive dualism; it was rather a 
vague materialism that we may compare to that 
of Tertullian who thought that the soul is the 
breath of God, flatus Det. Crude as it was, this 


6'The Greek text has: 

“The beginning of wisdom is the fear of God. 

And a good understanding have all they that practise it; 
Piety toward God is the beginning of knowledge, 

But wisdom and instruction the impious will set at nought.” 


The second line of this quatrain is found again in Ps. 111: 
10. It is not easy to decide whether the longer (Greek) form 
is preferable to the shorter (Masoretic). Toy, Proverbs, p. 11. 
Cf Prov, 9:710)5 Job. 28 3/28 5) Deut. 43 Gee Wcclesa i 2iceiasmeree 
Sirach 1: 11-27. 


TProyo ts 2-42 Vet Toy! ‘pe: 


Educational Aims 15 


point of view prevented the Hebrew from looking 
down upon the body, and saved him from a dan- 
gerous dualism leading inevitably either to as- 
cetism or to impurity. The concrete mind of the 
Hebrew did not really need to express itself in a 
word like our “ideal.” His was a very real, not 
a philosophical God. He desired a very concrete 
life. Life sanctioned by God was preserved in the 
family; the home was the visible ideal of hap- 
piness and duty; it was the first school of respect, 
the first church, the first state, the first system 
of preparation for life. A true interpreter of an- 
cient ideals took the commandment to which we 
referred above and welded it, into its ethical and 
religious content, social and national implica- 
tions. 


“Honour thy father and thy mother, as the Lord 
thy God commanded thee; that thy days may 
be long, and that it may go well with thee, upon 
the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.’’® 


The primary end of education was, therefore, 
to make of the child a good son. From that every- 
thing else would follow. This aim of education 
was older than the settlement in Palestine: it 
was common to all the Semites, but the Hebrews 
beautified it. This reverence for parents contin- 
ued after death; mourning ceremonies were of 
such a severe nature that many scholars think 
that they are evidences of ancestor worship. 


PSG toy tt Wout 2 LG tHe. 2012 3 Dey. .h9 2 ass 
BLOValaa oie ON t Oh cU-2oie LOLS Oo ta LOs ZO sh eons seh eos 


14 A Survey of Hebrew Education 


Early legends of Israel tell us also of a myste- 
rious power attending parental curses or bless- 
ings. Hence, we find in Israel a respect for old 
age, unparalleled except at Sparta, and in China. 
The Sacerdotal Legislator says: “Thou shalt 
rise up before the hoary head and honour the face 
of the old man.’ It is a healthy state of affairs 
When both the old and the young are satisfied 
that “The beauty of the old is their hoary 
head.” 

This respect for the old was such that the 
rulers of a tribe were called the elders, or, as the 
Arabs say today, the sheikhs, for the construc- 
tion of the EKastern government is but the en- 
Jargement of the paternal roof. These sheikhs 
naturally ruled the city when Israel became se- 
dentary. Ruling in political and social matters 
meant, of course, wielding authority in religious 
matters as well as offering sacrifices, a right 
which was claimed by the kings of Israel and 
Judah. 

God Himself was to His people an invisible 
and exalted Father; near, indeed, for they heard 
at times His footsteps, felt His breath, and 
quaked at His voice, yet, very super-human, be- 
cause even the mighty spirits who roam in the 
world were only His slaves. 

All children had to be taught the fear of the’ 
Lord, whether they were to serve Him by right. 

® Lev. 19: 32. 


10 Proy. 20:29b. Islam is true to its Semitic origins in for- 
bidding to dye the hair black. 


a 


Educational Aims 15 


(the males of Israel), or by grace (the females), 
or because of a bountiful favour extended to them 
(the strangers within the gates of Israel). One of 
the Psalms says: 


“Come my sons, listen to me 
Let me teach you the fear of the Lord.’’" 


This education never began too early. Such a 
thought underlies Psalm 28:9: 


“Whom shall he teach knowledge? 

Whom shall he cause to understand instruction? 
Those weaned from the milk, 

Those plucked from the breasts.” 


One can trace this idea throughout the whole 
history of the Hebrew nation, nay, of the Jewish 
race; civic ideals evolved because social condi- 
tions changed but the religious ideal of Israel 
remained faithful to itself. The prophetic tradi- 
tion held that Israel was to be a kingdom of 
priests, a nation of prophets, and a holy people. 
The ideal of the race was “holiness to the Lord”; 
it was from the very first a very concrete idea; it 
took firm hold of Israel during the exile when 
it became more intimately connected with the 
distinction between the pure and the profane. 
The sacerdotal writers often repeat: “Ye shall be 
holy for I am holy.” This concrete ethical mono- 
theism of the Hebrews was the unifying factor 
of their religious, moral, social, and political life. 
The Hebrews learned to be loyal at the same time 


11Ps,. 34:11. 


16 A Survey of Hebrew Education 


to their God and their tribe, then, to their God 
and their king, later, to their God and the church- 
state, then to God and the Law. God was always 
first. It is absurd to imagine any other place. 


They learned to find the springs of life in the 
Thorah. No one can tell how they made this great 
discovery. The evolution of the religion of Israel 
transcends the canons and dogmas both of the- 
ologians and specialists in history of religion. 
Other nations went through the crucible, none 
came out as Israel did, with a treasure that was 
to be a blessing to the world. Was it not because 
of the concreteness of ethical values in Israel? 
The Hebrews faced sorrows, trials, and times of 
gloom, but they were intensely loyal, sometimes 
savagely faithful to God, and thus they were al- 
lowed to see beyond the Via Dolorosa of their na- 
tion, a vision of the kingdom of lght. Home, 


Righteousness, God; these three greatest educa- — 
tional motives in Israel made him what he was. | 


When we come to specific aims in education, we 
are dealing with transient conditions and less im- 
portant values. The Hebrew boy’s ideal was to 
be an efficient member of a community which was 
first made up of shepherds, later of small farm- 
ers, and only after the exile of traders. There 
were many ideals for boys, the strong man like 
Samson, the man of craft and shrewdness like 
Jacob, the man who, like Joseph, found that one 
can climb up by the straight way as well as, if not 
better than, by any other. The stories of these 


_—_ 


Educational Aims 17 


men were of value even in their failures. The 
ideal of the Hebrew girl was to be a good wife, 
and the mother of a large family of boys. For her, 
there was no school but the home.” Even for boys, 
school education was not felt to be a universal 
need; it belonged rather to the realm of voca- 
tional education. Culture was not of books, 
neither was refinement a sign of it. When school 
education became more common, there remained 
a prejudice against books” and the schools were 
particularly strong in religion and morals, while 
the curriculum compared to ours was very 
meager in the field of knowledge and art. 

Davidson says’ that the civic consciousness of 
the Jews centered in three conceptions: 1, an 
omnipotent Creator, God who has chosen the 
Jews as his vice-gerents on earth; 2, a Messiah to 
restore them to this exceptional position; 3, holi- 
ness on their part as a condition to this restora- 
tion. 

This is, no doubt, a more or less true statement, 
but we feel that it does not tell the true secrets 
or aims of Hebrew culture; it is not always wise 
to transpose the thoughts of Israel to dogmas; in 
the East, truth is surrounded by a sheen of fic- 


1? The earliest passage on the education of girls is Sir. 7: 
24-25. There had been educated women in the past as, for in- 
stance, Huldah, 2 Kn. 22:14-26. On the whole subject of the 
status of women, the standard work is M. Loehr, Die Stellung 
des Weibes zu Jahwe Religion und Kultur, 1908, especially pp. 
32-37. 

2 Accles, 12:12. 

4 Davidson, History of Ed., p. 86. 


18 A Survey of Hebrew Education 


tion, often more real than our cold history. Some- 
thing of that still clings to Judaism, though it 
has unhappily disappeared from Western Chris- 
tianity. We shall, therefore, on purpose avoid 
classification and definition when dealing with 
he thoughts of Israel. 


CHAPTER III. 


THE SUBIECTS STUDIED 


While the Hebrews were nomads—and indeed 
until the return from the Exile—their education 
was entirely vocational. The boys learned from 
their father and from older boys, to tend the cat- 
tle, to hunt wild game, to become adepts in the 
use of bow and arrow, and of the sling. The girls 
learned to draw and carry water, to grind barley 
and other grains, to knead and bake flat cakes, 
to milk the ewes and cows, and churn the butter, 
to cook, to spin, weave, sew, embroider, and dye, 
to take care of the scanty belongings of the house- 


hold and to prepare simple remedies. The unmar- 


ried girls also tended the flocks and took them to 
pasture and helped the boys in the harvesting of 
the fields. Men were not helpless, however, and 
could cook. There was no formal religious instruc- 
tion. The young children’s imagination was fed 
on the tales repeated to them by their mother and, 
later, by their father, by the old men of the clan, 
by travellers, or by professional story tellers. 
They also watched the slaughtering of the domes- 
tic animals for food, which took place occasion- 


20 A Survey of Hebrew Education 


ally, and which always had a festal and sacrificial 
character. At spring time there was also the great 
festival of the yeaning of lambs, when the boys 
were circumcised, and the girls, adorned with the 
family jewels, danced in the open, while the 
young men, standing around, made jests upon 
them, laughing loud, and calling them their wives 
to be. The feast ended with the slaughtering of 
sheep, a barbecue, and more dancing in which the 
adults joined. This festival is interesting as the 
prototype of the Hebrew passover, the educa- 
tional significance of which we shall notice later. 
Nature study was from life’ with, of course, many 
superstitions. The Semite observed the sky, and 
his poetic imagination saw in it much that our 
city children will never dream of. It would seem 
that, since education was about the same for all, 
there was little need of vocational guidance 
apart from the most important determinant of 
sex. However, the first word a child uttered, the 
first gesture he made, his physiognomy, often de- 
termined his name and gave an omen of his fu- 
ture. Blessings, incantations, dedications, and 
curses influenced also his career. These beliefs 
and customs, connected with primitive magic, 


1Prov. 30:18, 19 Cf. Toy, Prov. 530, 531. 

2 Doughty writes (Arabia Deserta I, 278): “Zeyd said, with 
a sober countenance, ‘Your townfolk know better than me, but 
ye be also uncunning in many things, which the Arab ken. Khalil 
now, I durst say, could not tell the names of the stars yonder’ 
and pointing here and there, Zeyd said over a few names of 
greater stars and constellations, in what sort the author of 
Job in his old nomad wise, the Bear, Orion, and the Pleiades.” 





The Subjects Studied Zi 


were the crude beginnings of vocational psy- 
chology.” 

When Israel became sedentary, the boys and 
girls had, of course, to learn more. For most of 
them, if not for all, there was ploughing, sowing, 
harvesting, gleaning, the care of the vineyards, 
the making of wine. Most villagers knew the 
elements of several trades, but the larger the town 
was, the more specializing there was among its 
inhabitants. There were carpenters who made 
idols, ploughs, coffers, carts, and yokes; shep- 
herds, who took care of the sheep and the goats 
belonging to the town-dwellers; potters, tanners, 
cobblers, weavers, tailors, masons, goldsmiths, 
coppersmiths, blacksmiths, and barbers who were 
also surgeons. On the market could be found the 
fortune-teller and the snake charmer and the 
merchants who brought smoked fish, salt, honey, 
incense, perfumes, pearls, rugs, goblets, combs, 
richly mounted weapons, bronze dishes, furniture 
inlaid with ivory by the craftsmen of Egypt, pot- 
tery of the Aegean Islands, red earthenware of 
the Hittites, and the many-colored woolens of 
Babylon. 

There was found also the village scribe squat- 
ting on his mat, on which he had spread tablets 
of clay, papyri, styli, reed-pens, and inkhorn. He 
was much respected; he was the man who could 
seal the past, or make it speak. he kept accounts, 


3 Cf. Hollingworth, Vocational Psychology, 1916, 4-10, 


Z2 A Survey of Hebrew Education 


wrote letters, and contracts; he was very con- 
spicuous among the elders when they met at the 
gate to administer public justice. He owned a 
few books written in small columns on leather 
rolls, fixed on sitcks, written usually on one side 
only of the roll. It was not below his dignity to 
write short messages on potsherds (ostraka). 

Every village had one or more levites; they 
were men without a tribe, or rather they belonged 
to a tribe which had long ago lost its identity. 
They practised divination and offered sacrifices ; 
they also taught what was customary and proper, 
Among them, sacred knowledge was transmitted 
orally from father to son; it was as unnecessary 
to commit it to writing as the secrets of any 
other trade. 

There were also roving or settled guilds of 
young men, disciples of a nabi or prophet. The 
prophet would take out his small lute, finger it 
until he found the note that appealed to him, and 
then play the same weird note over and over, 
until ecstasy came; then the head thrown back, 
the eyes staring vacantly or shut, the nabi deliv- 
ered his message, often in poetical form. As for 
the rank and file among the disciples they had not 
attained this power, and they found inspiration 
in dancing and the repetition of sacred formulas 
until the spirit of God “leaped” upon them, filling 
them with religious frenzy. 

In the Eighth Century a new order of prophets 
arose. They were men who, sometimes, at first, 


The Subjects Studied 25 


resented being called by the name of nabi. They 
never were very numerous, and they had to fight 
constantly against the prophetic guilds, as well as 
against the levitical priesthood. Their work has 
been unique in the history of mankind. Because 
of them, the name of prophet, losing its former 
meaning of diviner and religious enthusiast, has 
come to mean the highest form of moral and spi- 
ritual leadership. The prophets preached in the 
temple courts at times, because there people com- 
monly congregated; they were not teachers of the 
young but, through their activity, the faith of 
Israel emerging purified and enriched from the 
great conflict with Baalism, and thus the home, 
made narrower by sedentary life, became more of 
a religious educative agency. 

According to most scholars, Ezekiel was not a 
preacher, but primarily a writer. If such is the 
case, the Hebrew community of which he was a 
member, was a reading community. It is not un- 
likely, for it was made up of the best elements of 
the population of Judah carried away to Babylon 
by Nebuchadnezzar. 

In Babylon, Israel learned to respect “what is 
written.” Perhaps from the very beginning, writ- 
ing had been regarded with some awe. We know 
that in Babylonia even grammatical, lexicograph- 
ical, and astronomical treatises, or fragments 
thereof, could be offered as a kind of votive-offer- 
ing. This high reverence for the written word 
showed itself in a special attempt at literal ac- 


24 A Survey of Hebrew Education 


curacy when ancient annals and prophetic ad- 
dresses were cast together. 

The Hebrew exiles were members of a commu- 
nity as civilized as was Italy, in the time of 
Dante, and they learned much from their conquer- 
ors. When thousands of them went back to the 
home-land, they were no longer the same people. 
Solomon was forced to depend on Phoenician 
artists when he built the first temple, but Zerub- 
babel used Jewish talent for the second. 

The establishing of schools, on a rather large 
scale, took place at that time. There were several 
reasons; one was that the children of the Jews 
were not learning the Hebrew language at home, 
because Aramaic was now commonly spoken. 
The other was that religion was now based on in- 
struction in the Thorah, ascribed to Moses. It has 
been said that the whole Law was, at an early 
stage, utilized for public instruction’. This is a 
rather misleading statement. There was no whole 
Thorah before its promulgation by Ezra, namely 
444 B.C., according to most critics, or 397, ac- 
cording to the latest studies on the books of Ezra- 
Nehemiah. 

The error in this statement is largely due to an 
indiscriminate use of the word Thorah. Kohler, 
for instance, in the passage quoted above, follow- 
ing traditionalist exegetes tells us that “Thorah” 
denoted originally “Law” and gives as proof the 
use in Ex. 24:12; Lev. 6:12; 7:1; 26: 46; he then 


* Kohler, Jew. Encycl, V, 42. 


The Subjects Studied 25 


says that in the course of time it, assumed the 
meaning of “religious teaching” as shown in Dt. 
faerie Mal ol. PS hoses? LOS Cty Les 
Prov. 3:1; 4:2; 6: 28; 7, 2. As a matter of fact it 
is just the reverse, as can be seen when the texts, 
in which thorah occurs, are arranged in chron- 
ological order. The primary meaning of thorah, 
preserved in the Akkadian word tertu, is “oracle.” 
A thorah was a decision rendered by the divinity 
through the mouth of the priest or other religious 
leader; it covered any doubtful point of custom 
on which the divinity was consulted; since, in the 
early history of Israel, religion was interwoven 
with every social practice, a thorah may be said 
to be an oracle bearing on religious custom; the 
meaning “law” is comparatively recent. 

In preéxilic times there was no formal re- 
ligious instruction in our sense of the term, still 
less any ethical teaching. It has been stated that 
“the words Wisdom, Intelligence, Knowledge, 
Doctrine, Counsel, Understanding, Guidance, Tho- 
rah, Teaching, Sagacity, Discretion, the Way, 
often finely drawn in the Bible, may represent 
crude divisions of general culture’.”’ Whatever 
this may mean, there is no evidence for this state- 
ment. 

We may say that religious instruction was not 
poured into children’s minds, but religious influ- 
ences permeated them continually. Religious in- 
struction was given concretely, through the sym- 


5A. Simon, Principles of Jewish Education in the Past, p. 11. 


26 A Survey of Hebrew Education 


bolism of religious rites and ceremonies, the sab- 
bath, the new moon, the annual festivals. The 
spring festival of the yeaning of the lambs had 
evolved into the Passover, a rite recalling hal- 
lowed memories to all Israel; other festivals were 
borrowed from the Canaanites and were, of 
course, of an agricultural character. Music, dan- 
cing, and singing were connected with these fes- 
tivals, as well as with other celebrations held on 
special occasions (circumcision, marriage-feast, 
shearing of lambs, harvesting, wine-making, re- 
turn from war, etc.). When the services in the 
Temple became more stately, imitating the ritual 
of the Babylonian sanctuaries, schools for temple 
Singers and musicians were established. 

When schools were established the reading mat- 
ter was, of course, religious, being part of our | 
Old Testament. 

Arithmetic was of a type that we may call 
mental. The present letters of the Hebrew alpha- 
bet have numerical values, but they are rather 
cumbrous and do not lend themselves easily to 
written arithmetical operations. The number 15 
is not written yh (5+10) but tw (9-+-6) ; this was 
done in order to show proper respect to the let- 
ters Yh which stood for Yah, the name of the 
Deity. If, in this manner of writing, the number 
15 was as old as the numerical use of the let- 
ters, we may argue from it that the latter was 
comparatively recent on the ground that this ex- 
treme respect for the name of the Deity is of post- 


The Subjects Studied 27 


exilic growth. Moreover, the order of the letters 
of the alphabet, in alphabetical Psalms and in 
Lamentations, differs in places from the order on 
which the numerical values are now _ based. 
Finally we know that the Babylonians, the 
Kgyptians, and the Phoenicians wrote figures 
with special signs; so did the Arameans at first. 
We have in the Aramaic papyri of Elephantine 
an important document which shows that He- 
brews of the Fifth Century were acquainted with 
figures.’ We do not know why they gave them up 
later for the far less practical system of letters. 

The value of z was known empirically as equal 
to 3, which is not very accurate,’ but, as it was 
not found faulty by the Babylonians who had 
very good surveyors, we must not belittle the at- 
tainments of the Hebrews in geometry. 

Literary instruction of a high order continued 
to be given orally in poems and stories, riddles 
and proverbs, fables and apologues. These were 
written only when the language was in danger of 
perishing. Thus the time came when the telling 
of religious folklore and legends at great festivals 
gave place to the more formal reading of the law 
in a language no longer familiar. 

Physical training of a high order is given by 
the nomadic life. To this day the sons of the no- 
bility of Mecca are sent to the desert in order to 
have their bodies hardened and strengthened. Af- 


®Sachau, Aram Pap., 1911, pp. 19, 71-89, 198. 
7] Kings 7:28. The same value is given in the Mishnah., 


28 A Survey of Hebrew Education 


ter the conquest of Canaan, the Hebrews re- 
mained a people who lived much in the open air; 
they made good soldiers. The young men were 
fond of physical exercises even before the period 
of Hellenistic influence. There was some kind of 
military training for all the free men, and it was 
perhaps attended with song, war dances, and 
calisthenic movements. Hebrew boys, like other 
boys, played games, and thus were in many ways 
prepared for life. 

Manual labour remained greatly honoured. 
Dr. Montessori has called attention to the high 
and symbolic significance given to the hand by 
the Deuteronomist®. It remained a tradition in 
Israel that scholars should be able to handle 
tools as well as the reed-pen, and every rabbi was 
able to earn his own living by manual labour. 
Some of us would like to see the same customs 
among us now-a-days. 

All men became acquainted with the common 
law at the open court at the gate, thus qualify- 
ing to become good citizens, and judges and jury- 
men. The development of written law brought to 
an end these informal schools of good citizenship. 

Astrology was forbidden; it was, no doubt, a 
wise provision in a way, but it nipped in the bud 
the science of astronomy. There was no meteor- 
ology, but a practical knowledge of the weather, 
an easier matter in Palestine than with us. The 
study of medicine was never very advanced. 


®’ Deut. 11:18. Cf. Montessori, Pedag. Anthrop., 314. 


The Subjects Studied 29 


Modern languages were learned by the so-called 
New Method of today. Many Hebrews were bi- 
lingual in preéxilic times, speaking Aramaic as 
well as their own Canaanite (or Hebrew dialect). 
After the exile we find education in a dead lan- 
guage (Hebrew), but it was probably as easy to 
learn as Latin for a European student of the 
Middle Ages. 

There was no plastic art among the Hebrews, 
owing to the “prophetic” teaching of the Deca- 
logue. If there was also what Delitzsch’ terms a 
defective sense of colour, painting must have been 
very crude. There was therefore little, if any, art 
education in Palestine, unless it be the teaching 
of the master workman to the apprentice or the 
mother to a daughter learning weaving or em- 
broidery. 


® Quoted by Abrahams, Art, Jewish, in Hastings’ Hneycl. of 
Rel. and Ethics, I. 871. 


CHAPTER IV. 
MEANS OF EDUCATION 


We have already emphasized the importance of | 
the home in Hebrew education. It remained to | 
the very last, in spite of the evolution of the fam- 
ily, the main agency for moral and religious edu- — 
cation. Comenius, who learned so much from Old 
Testament educational ideals, pointed out long 
ago that Gen. 18, 19 and Deut. 6:7 allude to this 
home education which, according to him is the 
basis, of all further progress. Of Abraham, the 
Lord says, in the oldest prophetic history of 
Israel (J), “I have approved of him, to the end 
that he may order his children and his household 
after him, that they may keep the way of the 
Lord, to do justice and judgment” (Gen. 18-19). 
We find the same idea in the Deuteronomist, 
“And these words which I command thee this day, 
shall be upon thy heart (or mind) and thou shalt 
impress them upon thy children, and shalt talk 
of them when thou sittest in thine house, when 
thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, 
and when thou risest up.” (Deut. 6:6-7). And 
again (Deut. 11:19), “Ye shall teach them your 
children, talking of them, when thou sittest in 


Means of Education 31 


thine house, when thou walkest by the way, when 
thou liest down, and when thou risest up.” And 
again in a deuteronomistic portion of Exodus, 
“That thou mayest tell it in the ears of thy son, 
and of thy son’s son.” (Exod. 10:2). About that 
supreme duty of life, the Psalmist declares: (Is. 
ASL i-LS).s 


“O God thou hast taught me from youth even until now 
And I have not ceased to publish thy marvels; 
Even to old age and hoary age, 
O God forsake me not, 
Until I declare Thy wondrous deeds 
To all the coming generations.” 


We find the same idea in Ps. 78: 3-6) : 


“What we have heard and learned, 
What our fathers have told us, 
We shall not hide from our sons; 
We shall tell the coming generation: 
The glory of the Lord and His might, 
The wonders that He performed. 
He instituted a charter in Jacob, 
He established a law in Israel, 
Which He ordered our fathers to teach their sons, 
In order that the coming generation may learn, 
And the sons to be born 
May stand up and tell their sons.” 


Such was the “succession” of learning in Israel 
to be preserved and true learning to be trans- 
mitted. That was to be the work of both parents. 

“Hear, my son, thy father’s instruction 
And forsake not thy mother’s tuition, 


They will be to thy head a wreath of beauty, 
And chains about thy neck” (Proy. 1:8). 


Shu A Survey of Hebrew Education 


“Keep my son thy father’s precepts, 
And reject not thy mother’s tuition, 
Bind them constantly to thy heart, 
Hang them around thy neck” (Prov. 6:20). 


We have in Proverbs 31: 1-9 the maxims of con- 
duct given to king Lemuel by his mother. There 
we are told also (Prov. 10:1): 


“A wise son makes a glad father, 
But a foolish son is a grief to his mother.” 


And again, Prov. 28: 22, 24, 25, as emended by 
Toy: 
“Hearken to thy father, who begat thee, 
And despise not the words of thy mother; 
The father of a righteous man will be glad, 
The mother of a wise son will rejoice, 
Let thy mother rejoice, 
Let thy father be glad.” 


And again (Prov. 17, 25): 


“A foolish son is a grief to his father, 
And bitterness to her that bare him.’ 


Not only was not the home a mere preparation 
for the school, but it was a school both for ex- 
perience and for more formal learning. The di- 
rect share of the boy in the works of men gave 
to his character unity and strength. The mothers 
taught their children to find, in helping them, the 
way of playing and learning at the same time. 

The rich and the mighty, as in other countries, 
often performed their parental duties through 


M Bane of Education 2; 


deputies. They had attendants or nurses who 
looked after their child and often remained with 
him when he had grown up to be an adult. Thus 
Abraham entrusted his son Isaac to a servant in 
whom he had great confidence and who travelled 
to Mesopotamia to fetch a wife for Isaac. We hear 
of nursing fathers (lit. nourishers) (Numb. 
11:12; Is. 49: 23) and of nursing mothers (Is. 49, 
23), who perhaps are the wives of the former. 
The kings, of course, entrusted their offspring, 
often very numerous, to preceptors who often 
were prophets. Isaiah taught much to his pupil 
Hezekiah; he did expect great things from him, 
laid up a wonderful program of reformation and 
happiness for all, which is one of the first forms 
of Messianic hope. 

Cornill’ thinks that even reading and writing 
were taught at home; it is certain that we have 
no clear evidence of the existence of schools be- 
fore the Third Century unless we find some evi- 
dence of school methods in Is. 28: 9-13, or unless 
we see a school in the little group of disciples 
that sat at Isaiah’s feet and to whom he trusted 
to complete his work (Is. 8:16). 

Several writers on education mention indeed 
the so-called schools of the prophets; the term it- 
self is not biblical; it has been said, by G. F. 
Moore, that they were schools in exactly the same 
sense that schools of fish are schools. They were 
gatherings of young men who, under leadership, 


1Cornill, Culture of Ancient Israel, p. 91. 


34 A Survey of Hebrew Education 


held religious meetings characterized by enthusi- 
asm and prophetic frenzy, similar to the assem- 
blies of dervishes and khouan in Modern Islam’. 
We have already shown in Chapter II what the 
early prophet or nabi was. 

The references to teachers, in our sense of the 
term, are all late’; the first teachers of reading 
and writing were probably scribes who, in addi- 
tion to their usual work as letter-writers and no- 
taries public, taught informally a few children 
who bawled over their lessons in the yard or on 
the house-top. Sometimes the master was a mer- 
chant, who taught in his shop between lengthy 
conversations held with his customers. No doubt 
his pupils enjoyed the school hours, for there was 
much to relieve the dullness of their task. This 
system, or rather the lack of it, was very much 
like the conditions praised by Tolstoy in his 
Pedagogical Articles. 

Independently of these instructors in the rudi- 
ments, we find other masters who taught orally. 
They are the levites and the priests, whose duty 
it became more and more to instruct the people 
in ritual, and in religious and ethical duties; the 
new order of prophets, who were preachers of so- 
cial righteousness, and the wise men who, perhaps, 


*The best description of these is by Masqueray, Souvenirs 
et Visions WAfrique, p. 123-167 and Doutté, Les Aissaoua a 
Tiemcem, p. 10-19. For their seamy side see Mouliéras, Le 
Maroc Inconnu. 

* Prov. (3/12) 13 3°13.¢20. Ps, 843:7 > 119% OO sO ene eee 
Ciii2s7 Kings 1021-5); 2 ‘Chroni) 24 326525 201.7 27-9. 


Means of Education 35 


were on a small scale like the sophists of Greece, 
although they taught a different kind of wisdom. 
The Book of Proverbs and the Book of Akikar are 
the results of their teaching. 

The old idea that the father was the natural 
teacher lingers in the title “father” given to the 
household levite; the levitical singers of the 
Temple of Solomon are called sons of the Master- 
singer. Possibly Isaiah describes his disciples as 
the “children” whom the Lord has given him (Is. 
8:18). 

Late texts (Deut. 12:3; 11:3) tell of the glory 
of faithful teachers, but their greatest praise was 
in the commonly accepted notion that God Him- 
self was their great prototype, the great teacher 
of Israel (Job 86:22; Ex. 4, 12). These are the 
things that help to turn a trade into a vocation. 

Thorndike has said excellently’, “Teachers are, 
of course, only a small fraction of the human 
means of education. Parents and friends are per- 
haps surer means; public speakers and writers 
are perhaps weightier; and the vague sum of be- 
haviour, which is called public opinion, custom, 
or the mores, is more widespread.”’ Such was emi- 
nently the case in Israel. We may not be able to 
measure accurately the influence of that vague 
public opinion, we only know that among Eastern- 
ers it has at least as great an influence as among 
us, and that is not a little. The great authorities 
on manners, customs, and faith were the Mass 


Thorndike, Hducation, p. 119. 


36 A Survey of Hebrew Education 


and the Past; the Hebrews clung to it as a gen- 
eral fund of a national experience which it was 
safe to follow; they remained thoroughly at- 
tached to the “conventions, forms, and institu- 
tions, that, after all, represent the corporate wis- 
dom, the accumulated experience of men through- 
out the ages.” The “ancient paths” were the safe 
way. 

We have no information as to salaries of teach- 
ers. Supervision was that of public opinion. 
There was no organized school administration, no 
preparation of teachers. It is quite evident that 
the large share taken by the father in the educa- 
tion of his children was possible only in a so- 
ciety where there was more leisure than we have 
today, and where, moreover, there was more true 
democracy than in the supposedly more enlight- 
ened Greco-Roman antiquity. 

In early Israel, boys were circumcised at the 
age of puberty; we do not know whether this rite 
was preceded by initiatory training, as it is 
among most nature peoples; in historical times 
the age for circumcision was so early that the 
rite had no longer any educational significance 
for the child thus initiated. Older children watch- 
ing the festival might probably be led to enquire 
about its meaning. 


CHAPTER V. 
METHODS 


Before we take up the question of methods, we 
must decide whether it is worth while or not. 
Abram Simon says, “Well defined and scientific 
principles do not exist in the Bible. It is stupid 
to attempt to translate psychological words like 
spirit, soul, mind, flesh, and heart from our 
Bible into modern technical terminology. It is 
foolish to inject William James into Jeremiah.” 
All this may be very true. And yet scientific work 
of the best quality has been done on the meaning 
of spirit, soul, mind, and heart in the Old Testa- 
ment; and as for injecting William James into 
Jeremiah it would be an absurd thing to do; it 
would probably be better to do the opposite. As 
a matter of fact, there is a pedagogy in the Bible, 
and it is very much of the kind that underlies 
Tolstoy’s Pedagogical Articles, which some of us 
think is a book with a message. 

We shall consider first, the question of dis- 
cipline; secondly, that of general method; thirdly, 


1A. Simon, The Principle of Jewish Education in the Past, 
tas: be 


38 A Survey of Hebrew Education 


what we can find in ancient Hebrew education on 
special methods. 

Much has been written about the severity of 
Hebrew education. Until a few decades ago, our 
own educational methods claimed to be inspired 
by it. The subject has then an actual interest, 
Hebrew sages advised us to 
“Train the child in the way he is to go 


When he is old, he will not depart therefrom” (Ps. 
vise Md 0 Yo 


The same idea occurs in two other passages of 
Proverbs where the text is corrupt and is 
emended by Toy; in the first, Yahweh’s dealings 
with His own are compared to that of the best 
father (Prov. 3:11, 12): ‘ 


“Reject not, my son, the instruction of Yahweh, 
And spurn not His reproof, 

For whom He loves He reproves, 

And afflicts him in whom He delights.” 


And elsewhere, Prov. 29, 21, Greek text: 


“He who from a child lives luxuriously will be 
a servant, and in the end will come to grief.” 


“The classical passage, well known to our fore- 
fathers, is Prov. 13: 24: 


“He who spares his rod hates his son, 
But he who loves him chastises him.” 


We find the same idea in Proverbs 22:15: 


“Folly is bound to the mind of a child; 
But the rod of correction will remove it.” 


Methods 39 
And again, in Proverbs 23:13, 14: 


“Withold not chastisement from the child; 

If thou beat him with the rod, he will not die, 
Thou must beat him with the rod, 
And rescue him thus from Sheol.’ 


Elsewhere, in Prov. 19:17: 


“Chastise thy son while there is still hope, 
Set not thy heart on his destruction.” 


And finally, Prov. 29:15, 17: 
“The rod of correction gives wisdom, 
But a child left to himself brings disgrace on his 
mother. 
Correct thy son, and he will yield thee comfort, 
And give delight to thy soul.” 


From Is. 2:10 we gather that to chastise and 
to teach were synonymous terms. 

In order to be fair to the Hebrews, we must re- 
member that the whole educational system of 
antiquity was built on the same conception of 
severity, and so was ours, even until after the 
days of Pestalozzi. Moreover, we must note among 
the Hebrews a growing tendency to be more 
lenient ; while the Deuteronomist allowed a father 
to condemn to death a son who proved unman- 
ageable (Deut. 21:18-22), in later times, social 
ostracism took the place of this stern right of the 
father in ancient Hebrew society (Prov. 27:8). 
The Hebrews were, in theory, as impatient of 
moral crookedness as the Spartans of rachitism, 
They had the hardness of pioneers, being, of 


40 A Survey of Hebron Education 


course, the pioneers of the world in moral educa- 
tion. 
The Hebrew parent expected respect. The old 
customs enacted the death penalty for the son 
who cursed him.’ Ancient lore connected the sub- 
jection of the Canaanites with disrespect shown 
to Noah by one of his sons. There again we notice 
later an evolution towards a greater leniency, 
“He who curses father or mother, 
His lamp will go out in deepest darkness.” (Prov. 20: 
20). 
Another proverb is more severe (Prov. 30, 17, 
text emended by Toy) : 
“The eye that mocks a father, 
And scorns the old age of a mother, 


The ravens of the valley will pick it out, 
And vultures will eat it.” 


Obedience to the father was like that of a slave 
to his master; at least such was the ideal as can 
be seen by the parallelism in Mal. 1:6, 16: 

“A son honoureth his father 
And a slave his master.” 

One of the laws of the Sacerdotal code (Lev. 

19:3) puts the mother first when it enjoins, 


“Ye shall fear every man his mother and his father.” 
That, of course, was an ideal. From the fact 


that the great majority of the Hebrews followed 
Absalom in his rising against David, and espe- 


2 Bixod., 21.517; Lev. 20:9. (Cf Deut. 27:16 senses 
LO 3) exe 211 5.1175 Lev. 206) 9 2) Devt faa aes 


Methods 4 


cially from the fact that the practical psychol- 
ogist Ahitophel gave him very wicked, though 
very political, advice (2 Sam. 16: 21-23), we may 
infer that the ideal was not always realized, not 
even in Israel. ; 

The teacher, being the father’s deputy, used the 
rod generously. In Is. 32:4 the parallelism shows 
that a stammerer was looked upon as synonymous 
with an evil person. Let us hope that the Hebrew 
teacher was illogical and did not take the stutter- 
ing of his little pupils over their rude letters 
scratched on rough boards as a sign that they 
badly needed the Hebrew panacea for foolishness. 

Indeed there were those in Israel who had dis- 
covered that corporal punishment is not a cure-all 
for everybody (Prov. 17, 10): 


“A reproof enters deeper into a man of sense 
Than a hundred stripes with a fool.” 


Two Hebrew verbs express our idea of learn- 
ing, the first ’alaph means literally to cleave to, 
to become familiar with; the second, lamadh, 
more frequently used, means to exercise in, to 
accustom to. We shall note that the latter is used 
also (Hab. 10:11) with the meaning of training 
a bullock to the yoke, and that the ox-goad was 
called malmed (Judg. 3, 31), namely the thing 
that teaches. There was indeed no “soft pedagogy” 
in Israel. A pupil was called melwmmad or tal- 
mid, namely ‘one who is being trained,” we were 
going to say, “one who is being broken in.” He 


42 A Survey of Hebrew Education 


was also called a “son,” and the teacher (moreh) 
was his “father,” but that was no warrant for 
leniency, in the light of what precedes. 

Teaching was chiefly oral; we already saw that 
the wise mother of Lemuel taught him proverbs 
and maxims, but that was done usually by the 
father, older friends, and sometimes teachers. 
Recent excavations have brought to light the 
story of Ahiqar in its earliest Aramaic form as it 
was known to the Jewish community of Ele- 
phantine.* Thus had the instructions of former fa- 
thers become stereotyped in the form of precepts, 
proverbs, and apologues, the stock of which was 
enriched by each generation. The method was 
good, for, in the words of Boutroux, “Maxims are 
that form of theory which comes nearest to prac- 
tice.” * Wisdom Literature was sometimes com- 
posed with an alphabetical structure, a mnemonic 
device, which was not necessarily artistic or in- 
spiring, and can be seen in Prov. 30: 10-31, called 
by some “The Golden ABC of the perfect wife.” 

In many ways teaching was less artificial than 
with us. Country life was familiar to all. Even 
Jerusalem was a very small city. Every child 
knew the world of nature by personal observa- 
tion, and not by hearsay; he could observe the 
ants, the grasshoppers, and the birds, and learn 
from them; the market plate was a living dio- 
rama. Thus the vocabulary of a Hebrew child was 

’ Sachau, Aram. Papyrus, 147-182; Charles, Apoc. and Pseud., 


Il 715-84. 
*Boutroux, Hducation and Ethics, p. xxix. 


Methods 5 43 


not far ahead of his knowledge of objects. No 
child of Jerusalem would have had to learn 
Mother Goose Rhymes (or their equivalent) with- 
out ever having seen a goose. 

The teacher often taught in the open air; then 
there was more liberty than with us; more seri- 
ousness mixed with merriment; there was joy in 
the noise made by each scholar shouting his sing- 
song lesson at the top of his voice. The means of 
education were not of the best, but there is, after 
all, some virtue in methods that do not take 
“every little stone out of the student’s road.” ”* At 
least, they allow a child to protect himself by a 
certain amount of indifference against too strict 
a curriculum. There was no compulsory home 
work, no regular tests or examinations, no diplo- 
mas. Blessed were the Hebrew children, for there 
was, in their time, no artificial system of peda- 
gogy, no fanciful conception of an abstract, un- 
real child to take in the teacher’s mind the place 
of loving interest in individual, concrete samples 
of young humanity. There was no contrast be- 
tween a high ethical ideal taught by the educator 
and the pitilessness of struggle for life; the de- 
moralizing dualism of our civilization came only 
with Hellenism, and the book of Ecclesiastes 
gives us some unholy echoes of it. There was no 
conflict between Moses and Darwinism; men went 
to church (or rather to synagogue and temple) ; 
to be a man did not mean to be the cartoon of a 


5K. Key, Century of the Child, 250. 


44 A Survey of Hebrew Education 


man. There was no child labour and no child idle- 
ness; children were kept busy in the home, but 
were given plenty of chances to play. The Hebrew 
child was happier than our New York children, 
for the same reason that the Arabian child or the 
African child of today is happier. He had more 
imagination; his clay dolls, his mud and straw 
houses, his simple toys and his many games 
opened to him a brighter world. There was no 
anxious watching over his health, no timid out- 
look upon life, no stilted supervised games, no 
continual system of vigilance; the Hebrew child 
was not as ours protected from every drop of un- 
boiled water, and that was perhaps partly wrong; 
but his mind was better preserved from polluting 
influence than the minds of children are today in 
ultra-civilized communities. No doubt the society 
in which he lived had no educational system as 
well thought out as ours, but society had a better, 
if less methodical, way of dealing with children. 
The Hebrews formulated no general method of 
education in the strictest sense of the term, but 
they had the foundations of an excellent one. 

Of special methods in education we have only 
hints. The truths of the social faith of Israel were 
taught concretely by festivals, ceremonies, words, 
and symbols. We know the endless questionings 
of children; such home and community cere- 
monies were the best means of both arousing 
them and fixing the right answer into their minds. 
Some thought that it would be to the fame of the 


Methods 45 


Hebrews to have discovered the catechetical 
method before Socrates.” We are not sure that 
they deserve such credit. The texts quoted (Exod. 
12-16; Deut. 6: 7, 20) do not justify the assertion. 
It may be that in questioning the learner repeated 
the words of the teacher, so that the first member 
of a proverb or a psalm should be propounded as 
a riddle: 

“Why is the way of the slothful man as a hedge of 

thorns? 


Why is envy the rottenness of the bones? 
Who hath said in his heart, There is no God?” 


This method of questioning remained in Jew- 
ish education, but we know of no Hebrew cate- 
chism older than the Hinuch of A. Halevi written 
in 1302 A.D. 

To read was to give loud advice from a book;’ 
writing was only a help to memory, the contents 
of the written page were, to a great extent, fa- 
miliar to the reader; if he was a beginner he first 
had to learn the contents by heart to become fa- 
miliar with them. There was no phonic-teaching 
because there were no written vowels.” The He- 
brew method was really the imitative method of 
Huey; it is probably the best, and in a modified 
form is used by us today. “Many an American 
child,” says Huey, “cannot remember when read- 








°T. B. Scannell, in Catholic Encycl. V, 76. 

“The root ga@ra means to call, proclaim, read. The same 
idea is in the Anglo-Saxon raedan. 

8 Klostermann, Schulwesen, 20-21, claims that the emended 
text of Is. 50:4 shows that clear articulation was taught. 


46 A Survey of Hebrew Education 


ing began, having by a similar method pored over 
the books and pictures of nursery jingles and 
fairy tales that were told to him, until he could 
read them for himself.” Miss Everett, writing in 
the New York Teachers’ Monographs (June 1902), 
thinks that “some day the debris and obstructive 
technique of reading methods may melt away 
into the simplicity of some such practice as this.” 
The Hebrew child was most fortunate in that 
there were no vowel points in the texts set before 
him, and even that there was no separation be- 
tween words. Thus even if the teacher was not 
very able, he could not make him spell out the 
words. The pupil read, as he should, in getting the 
mening of whole sentences, a method proved the 
best by experimental pedagogy. When the He- 
brew language ceased to be a living tongue, a 
pointer was used. That was a bad innovation. If 
a child is allowed to point, he reads word by 
word, i.e., unintelligently. However the pointer 
was an improvement on grimy fingers. Later still, 
vowels were added to the text in accordance to the 
law that the more unfamiliar a sequence may be, 
the more the perception of it proceeds by letters. 
Reading was accompanied by a kind of singing, 
which was helpful, because children like to make 
noise, and because it fixed into the mind the mem- 
ory of the sounds and their sequence. Especially 
when reading poetry, reading was also facilitated 
by rocking the body, a custom followed by all 
orientals today. 


Methods 47 


There was no cursive writing distinct from 
print; there were no minuscules; the shape of 
the letters was good because their characteristic 
differences are found in their upper part; here 
again, experimental pedagogy has shown that we 
habitually find most meanings in the upper parts 
of objects; the shape of some letters leads to 
confusion in the square Hebrew characters used 
today as well as in the rabbinnical characters, 
but it was not so in the older Hebrew script 
where such confusion was less likely to take 
place. 

The letters of the alphabet were taught by a 
method similar to the modern device of saying 
“A is an archer” or of associating A with apple, 
A was a bull (Aleph), B a house (Beth) and in 
ancient Hebrew the very shape of the letter re- 
called these names.’ It was probably easier for 
a child to understand that consonants are really 
vowelless, when no consonants were written. 

Another point is worthy of notice. There were 
none of the books now called “readers,” but 
children began to read the best their race had 
produced, and it was in a language they under- 
stood well. While there are in many countries 
two forms of language, one literary, one vernac- 
ular, the Hebrews knew only the language of the 
people. Even an Isaiah wrote in it. Modern Ara- 


®*Klostermann, Schulwesen, 22-26, has an interesting argu- 
ment on Is. 28:9 ff, where he maintains that at the time of 
Isaiah the names of the letters were different, Sade being called 
Saw, Qoph being called gaw (cf. our use of Waw). 


48 A Survey of Hebrew Education 


bie by its resemblance to the Biblical Hebrew 
confirms the evidences of evolution that are ex- 
hibited by the latter, and are found only in a 
language of the people. 

There was no grammar, no text book of his- 
tory, nor of natural science. There is something 
to be said for a method which depends on the 
personality of the teacher. We may envy the He- 
brew child who, because he lived at a time when 
chronological accuracy was undreamt of, had no 
dates to learn and learned and remembered his- 
tory as a living subject, as true to life as some 
of our historical novels. For it is true in many 
ways that fiction is truer than history; most cer- 
tainly when that fiction is of the type of Schef- 
fe’s Hkkehard or the history of David and Go- 
liath by an unknown rhapsodist of Israel. 

Of the teaching of arithmetic we know noth- 
ing. [t was never very advanced, but remained 
largely mental because there was no easy nota- 
tion; from that point of view, it was good. 

Geography was essentially home geography. 
The frequent pilgrimages to sanctuaries in the 
early period, to Jerusalem in the later, must have 
increased very much the stock of ideas in the 
children and boys who took part in them. 

The sitting posture of the pupils in Hebrew 
schools was rational, much more than that com- 
pelled by our school forms. Godin has proved 
that there are only two resting positions for 
man, namely lying down and squatting. 


CHAPTER VI. 


RESULTS OF HEBREW EDUCATION 


Hebrew education—in the larger sense of the 
term—was a success. Its quality was at least 
equal to that of the ancient Greeks; it was also 
more democratic, and was available to the largest 
number. There was little slavery in Israel. He- 
brew education was a training for life. It had 
the advantages of household education in this 
country one or two generations ago, an educa- 
tion that progressive and wealthy schools try 
now to reorganize under new conditions. Indeed 
it had more advantages, for the Hebrew home was 
not closed like ours. Eastern education has had 
better results than ours in the training of chil- 
dren. Lane says that an undutiful child is very 
seldom heard of among the Egyptians or the Ar- 
abs in general. That was true of the whole East. 
Jewish education had the same results until 
lately, when new conditions have impaired or de- 
stroyed its Eastern character. 

It is quite evident that, both as to extent and 
content, Hebrew formal education cannot be 
compared with ours. It would be quite unfair to 
compare it with our reformed educational sys- 


50 A Survey of Hebrew Education 


tems of the Twentieth Century; if, however, we 
made our comparison with our [ighteenth Cen- 
tury, the contrast is less striking. Even after the 
French Revolution, at the beginning of the last 
century, social conditions and educational at- 
tainments were worse in certain parts of Europe 
than in Judea, at the time of Nehemiah. Rous- 
seau, who is hailed by everybody as an educa- 
tional light, had not the slightest desire to bring 
education to the masses. Thorndike says excel- 
lently: “Everybody” was agreed two hundred 
years ago that the aims of education were to 
teach boys who inherited wealth and power to 
live up to the traditional notion of a gentleman, 
and to teach boys who were born in poverty and 
serfdom to live down to the traditional notion of 
a workingman. The Hebrews had at least a dif- 
ferent ideal; that of national education. As the 
Deuteronomist said: “Surely this great nation is 
a wise and understanding people” (Deut. 4, 6). 
Whether Joshua ben Gamala was the Horace 
Mann of Judea or not, it remains true that there 
was in Israel a strong tendency to give educa- 
tion to all long before his days; perhaps his de- | 
cree was merely a reformation of an ancient ideal. 
It was also an education adapted to the needs of 
the people. 

There is, of course, a paradox as well as truth 
in Tolstoy’s statement that, “There are no good 
books for the people, not only in our country, 


1Thorndike, Hducation, p. 49. 


Results of Hebrew Education 51 


but even in Europe.” Tolstoy could not have 
said that of ancient Israel, for most of the 
Old Testament was written by so many anony- 
mous hands that we may call it a book of the 
people, written by the people, and for the people. 
An education that blossoms into and through 
such a masterpiece has certainly been a success. 
The Hebrews learned no formal grammar; this 
is probably why they produced such literature, 
for, as Ellis said, the greatest literature of any 
people is produced in the transition stage from 
the oral to the written transmission of tradi- 
tion, when written language has all the expres- 
siveness of oral speech and is as yet untrammeled 
by the artificialities of grammarians. 

Only a few of the Hebrews actually read these 
books, because they were expensive, but, after 
all, it does not matter whether we learn litera- 
ture through the eye or through the ear. To this 
day the amount of literature read by the average 
school child is very small. Eliot has shown that 
it takes a high school graduate forty-six hours 
to read aloud what is read by our school children 
in six years, and a good deal of it is of indifferent 
literary value. We are not so very well advanced 
after all in our enlightened times. 

As to the proportion of the Hebrew popula- 
tion that was able to read, it is difficult to as- 
certain; we are told of almost every leading per- 
son in the history of Israel that he read and 


2 Pedag. Articles, p. 32. 


ay A Survey of Hebrew Education 


wrote; but whether they did this alone or through 
secretaries is not certain. Hearing is more fre- 
quently mentioned than reading. The name of 
the city of Kiriat Sepher, Book Town, may point 
to the rarity of school learning as well as to its 
abundance. It might in later times be argued 
from Sir. 38: 38-89 that even so.simple an accom- 
plishment as reading was unusual then. But it 
has also been remarked that from that passage as 
well as from Sir. 39:38 ff. one may argue with 
equal plausibility that the book of Ecclesiasticus 
was to be read by the general public. The spies 
sent by Joshua could write; Gideon expected any 
young man to be able to do so as it seems from 
Judg. 8:14. Some, at least, of the workingmen 
who dug the conduit of Siloam circa 700 B. C. 
could write, for they left us an inscription in the 
rock. To read fast was a commonly desired ac- 
complishment (Hab. 2, 2). The Deuteronomist 
commands the Hebrews to engrave sentences 
upon the posts of their houses and their gates 
(Deut. 6:9; 11:20), thus supposing a commu- 
nity where reading is not uncommon. The numer- 
ous Aramaic ostraka found in Egypt show that 
writing was not uncommon among the Jewish 
refugees who lived there. All these data can be 
interpreted differently; we are still unable to de- 
cide with any degree of certainty as to the ex- 
tent of school education among the Hebrews. All 
we can say is that it was the privilege of very 
few during their nomadic stage, and of a rather 


Results of Hebrew Education 53 


large section of the community in post-exilic 
times. Again let us repeat that Hebrew education 
was not essentially book education. Its results 
are to be measured accordingly. 

Davidson gives four valuable results of Jew- 
ish education. 1, Taste for close, critical study ; 
2, sharpening of the wits; 3, reverence for the 
law and desirable social conduct; 4, and a power- 
ful bond of union.’ Only the third and, to some 
extent, the fourth were products of Hebrew, as 
distinguished from later Jewish education. 


3’ Hist. of Ed., p. 80. 


CHAPTER VII. 


AN ESTIMATE OF HEBREW EDUCATION. 
WHAT CAN IT TEACH US? 


The best, perhaps the truest, science is ap- 
plied science. The most important part of the 
bistory of education is its application to our 
present and our future. ‘Knowledge,’ says 
Thorndike, “is of value in proportion to the im- 
portance to human welfare of the situation to 
which it applies . . . Knowledge of steam engines 
would be preferred to knowledge of millinery, in 
spite of the fact that hats figure more frequently 
in life. Knowledge pertaining to moral conduct 
is thus above knowledge pertaining to manners 
.. . knowledge pertaining to the family and the 
state is above knowledge pertaining to such con- 
ventions of language as spelling and punctua- 
tion.” The history of education is one of the 
best guides in this classification and department 
of knowledge; it is a necessary introduction to 
what Claparéde has called teleologic pedagogy 
which borrows ideals for educative action from 
morals, philosophy, ewsthetics, religion, sociology, 


1 Thorndike, Hducation, pp. 129-130. 


An Estimate of Hebrew Education oF) 


and politics. Science is ideal-blind, but science 
is only the foundation of the temple of knowledge. 
I’rom that point of view, the educational experi- 
ment made by the Hebrew nation is of paramount 
importance. In a way we are today going back to 
old conditions at least in our dreams of an im- 
proved world. Dewey says ‘“a_ distinctively 
learned class is now out of the question. It is 
an anachronism. Knowledge is no longer an im- 
mobile solid; it has been liquefied. Educational 
reformers, some perhaps would call them vision- 
aries, often give us, unconsciously, echoes of the 
Hebrew message. We have already shown how 
some of the ideas of Tolstoy and E. Key were 
well known in Israel. We must not forget that 
these prophets of a new education did not de- 
spise the past as such. “The old education,” 
said E. Key, “was relatively most excellent... 
(consisting) solely in keeping oneself whole, pure, 
and honourable. For it did not depreciate per- 
sonality.’” 

The idea of equality emphasized so much by 
Tolstoy as a basic principle of education was ex- 
emplified in Israel as it was in the glorious days 
of Islam. The shepherd and the peasant spoke as 
well if not better, than the son of the courtier. 

We must remember that the Hebrew religion 
was not only an ethical system or a ritualistic 
code. It told of a God who was very near to men, 

2 Dewey, School and Society, p. 40. 


3H. Key, Century of the Child, p. 115. Cf. Tolstoy, Pedag. 
Articles, p. 20. 


56 A Survey of Hebrew Education 


although there was around Him a mystical halo 
and a nearly concrete holiness. We, of the West, 
are not well gifted in religious genius and so we 
have had to borrow our religions from the East, 
where people are known to be holy and practical 
and matter-of-fact in their attitude towards the 
Unknown. It is treachery to ‘call that type of 
education theocratic, as most histories of educa- 
tion do. Indeed the Semite in general, more es- 
pecially the Arab of history, is ‘“‘an essentially in- 
dependent and skeptical being.” And yet he is 
an artist in religion. So was the Hebrew. This is 
why Hebrew educational ideals are the glory of 
Israel. There was an ideal education of a high 
grade in ancient Persia, in China, in India, but it 
never could become the heritage of the world. 
Babylon and Egypt, more civilized than Israel, 
did not probably rise even as high as Persia in 
their conception of moral education. They gave to 
the world the beginning of its science but not the 
foundation of its ethics. The Spartans and the 
old Athenians wanted to be brave men, the old 
Romans knew how to obey, but the old Greek 
education was unable to maintain its hold upon 
men when Hellas became more civilized and the 
eld Roman education gave way also before the 
less virile ways of the new Hellas. Hebrew edu- | 
cation trained servants of God who knew how to | 
be brave and obedient; except among a minority 
of wealthy Sadducees, their educational ideals 
remained untarnished by Hellenism. This is why 


An Estimate of Hebrew Education 57 


mankind is their debtor. The Health of the World 
came indeed from the Jews. No decadence af- 
fected their educational ideals. 

The influence of Greco-Roman education in its 
later form, decadent, if more gentle, has not been 
an unmixed blessing. It made our education 
formal, intellectual, aristocratic; it disgraced 
manual labor; it retarded vocational education ; 
it wove into our mental fabric the mischievous 
distinction between physical and mental, due to 
the disciples of Socrates. We see now that knowl- 
edge is not the aim of education, and there was 
a danger in the Socratic motto, “Know thyself,” 
if it was divorced from Socratic common sense. 
The deadening influence of Ciceronianism, as also 
the weakness of Erasmus, came from their not 
being in touch with the Hebrew ideals known 
to the early Renaissance educators, forgotten 
later in uncritical admiration of “classical” cul- 
ture. Josephus, who knew Hellenism well, 
claimed that Hebrew education was better than 
the Greco-Roman, because it was both theoretical 
and practical. History has justified him. The 
Greek with his art and his philosophy, the Ro- 
man with his law and his statesmanship, the Neo- 
Greek of the Renaissance with his erudition and 
his classicism, are of less real value today than 
the Old Hebrew, because they did not understand 
as well as he, that the most important element 
of education is moral discipline, that the Home is 
a place of Happiness and Duty, that true Great- 


58 A Survey of Hebrew Education 


ness is the Righteousness which can be found 
only by faith in God. 

It would have been better for the Christian 
Church and for medieval education if Church 
Fathers had known their Old Testament better. 
Augustine, for instance, would scarcely have 
evolved his doctrine of original sin, in the name 
of which the joy of living was, until recently, 
frowned away from the lives of many children. 
The Church, as a whole more faithful to the 
teaching of her Master, would not have been so 
ready to condemn the sinner, but would have 
tried “to redeem him through a sense of fellow- 
ship in the common fault, which is the scientific 
form of pardon.’” There would have been less, if 
any, of the inhuman and false sesceticism of the 
Middle Ages. Islam would not, perhaps, have con- 
quered the East and North Africa in the name 
of the ancient Semitic spirit so unhappily dead- 
ened by the Church. There would not have been 
so many of these misunderstandings and hatreds 
which have aroused against the Church the hos- 
tility of so many great souls and given birth to 
“VPesprit laique” in education. Locke would not, 
perhaps, have thought out his doctrine of the 
tabula rasa, if he had been familiar with the old 
Semitic mind and the value it sets on heredity. 
Our psychology would thereby have been spared 
much waste of time and would not perhaps have 
been led astray into verbal disquisitions. 


4 Montessori, Pedag. Anthrop, p. 360. 


An Estimate of Hebrew Education 59 


If Rousseau had had more than a vague knowl- 
edge of the Old Testament, remembered hazily 
through the roseate hues of the memory of a 
charming dilettante, he would have given us a 
better Emile, with more backbone. He would not 
have advocated the idea that children are good 
by nature, for indeed they are neither good nor 
bad, but have possibilities for both. He would not 
have advocated an education for aristocrats only, 
and a rather poor one at that. 

As for us, we can learn from Hebrew methods 
at times, from Hebrew ideals very often. In these 
days of machinery and complexity of crowded 
tenements, highly strained modes of living, noisy, 
standardized pleasures, we need an education 
that will provide an escape for the heart and 
mind. The Hebrew knew where to find it, even 
by the waters of Babylon. Perchance if we are in- 
spired by him we shall know how to deal more 
effectively with the problem of education in the- 
ory and practice. From the point of view of his- 
tory of education per se, we may learn from our 
study to be less dogmatic, to have little or no 
faith in labels given to people or great men. We 
have seen that Hebrew education was not theo- 
cratic. We should not say .with Davidson that 
the Hebrews before the exile must be classed as 
barbarians, along with the Pheenicians. Such 
classifications are meaningless. There barbarians 
are our masters and our teachers; we use their 
alphabet; we read their literature; we try to fol- 


60 A Survey of Hebrew Education 


low their social ethics. If the history of educa- 
tion paid more attention, as it should, to a care- 
ful study of racial intelligence, it would rate He- 
brew education high. 

Our study shows us that histories of education 
have wrongly emphasized the importance of for- 
mal knowledge as a sign of social growth as if 
the value of education could be gauged by the 
extent of school curriculum. 

Since Hebrew education should not be called 
theocratic what is its place in the development 
of educational history. We would like to classify 
education from a social point of view in four 
main types: 

1, Aristocratic (Greco-Roman). 

2, Social-theocratic (Medieval). 

3, Individualistic, humanistic, philosophic, ra- 
tionalist, realistic, scientific. 

4, Social-democratie. 

To the fourth type belong the present, in pro- 
eressive educational agencies, and, as we like to 
think, the future for all. Hebrew education was 
an early attempt of humanity to accomplish it; 
thus it belongs to history, prophecy, and art—to 
the past, the future, and our present. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


There is a very good selected bibliography in 
F. H. Swift, Education in Ancient Israel to 70 A. 
D. We shall give here only a supplement. 


C. LETOURNEAU, L’évolution de Véducation dans les diverses 
races humaines, Paris, 1898, 350-9. 
Anthropological point of view; not very well informed. 
A. R. S. KENNEDY, Education, in Hastings’ Dictionary of the 
Bible, 1900, I, 646-652. 
Excellent, entirely reliable. 


T. DAVIDSON, A History of Education, New York, 1890, 45- 
47; 77-86. 
The wrok of a great, but sometimes misinformed mind ; 
dabbles into erratic philology. 


G. H. BOX, Hducation, in Cheyne and Black’s Encyclopedia 
Biblica, 1901, II, 1189-1202. 
Excellent scholarly. 


O. WILLMANN, Didaktik als Bildungslehre, Braunschweig, 3rd 
ed. 1903, 138-140. 

Short but excellent survey giving the point of view of 
social pedagogy. 

E. P. CUBBERLY, Syllabus of Lectures on the History of Edu- 
cation, 2nd ed., New York, 1904, 19-23. 

An excellent text book but only a text book, 

P. MAGNUS, The Early School Teaching of the Jews, Nine- 
teenth Century, Sept., 1906; also in Hebrew Standard, Oct. 
5 and 20. 

Talmudic material, no originality. 

O. WILLMANN, Israelitische Erziehung in REIN, HEncyklopae- 
disches Handbuch dere Paedagogik, 2nd ed. 1906, IV, 592- 
595. 

Excellent; limited scope, y 


62 A Survey of Hebrew Education 


P. MONROE, A Brief Course in the History of Education, New 
York, 1907, 21-28. 
Crumbs from the master’s table. 


A. KLOSTERMANN, Schulwesen im alten Israel, Leipzig, 1908. 
The most original treatment of the subject. Very sugges- 
tive in places. No attempt to cover the whole field. 


A. SIMON, The Principle of Jewish Education in the Past, 
Washington, 1909, 5-32. 
Superficial; contributes nothing. 


E. P. GRAVES, A History of Education before the Middle Ages, 
New York, 1909, 110-137. 


E. DAY, The Social Life of the Hebrews, New York, 1910, 161- 
168. 
Popular. Right point of view. 


P. BARTH, Die Geschichte der Erziehung, Leipzig, 1911, 28- 
29. 
Only a few remarks. Social pedagogical point of view. 


L. KANDEL and L. GROSSMANN, Jewish Education in Mon- 
roe’s Cyclopedia of Education, 1912, III, 542. 


MORRIS JOSEPH, Education (Jewish) in Hastings’ Hncyclo- 
pedia of Religion and Ethics, 1912, V, 194-195. 
Inferior to most articles in that remarkable work. 


W. ROSENAU and A. SIMON, Jewish Hducation, Historical 
Survey, 1912. 


C. H. CORNHILL, The Culture of ancient Israel, English 
transl. Chicago, 1914, Chapter III (pp. 68-100). 
A lecture by a master in Old Testament criticism ; but not 
a pedagogical work. 


P. McCORMICK, History of Education, Washington, 1915, 
24-28. 
Very poor treatment. 


C. H. LEHMAN, Religious Education among the Jews, Encyclo- 
pedia of Sunday Schools and Religious Education, 1915, p. 
587. 

Weak. Does not show even the Importance of the subject, 


H. H. MAYER, Hducation, International Standard Bible Ency- 
clopedia, 1915, 900-905. 
Conservative, inferior to Kennedy and Box. 


J. K. HART, Democracy in Education, New York, 1918, 37-41. 

Sociological point of view. Written to defend a thesis. 

Maintains that Hebrew education failed to provide an es- 
cape from “folk ways,” 


Bibliography 63 


J. A. MAYNARD, The Problem of the Formation of Character 
in the Light of the History of Hebrew Education. Angl. 
Theol. Rev., 1920, pp. 228-235. 


A. P. DUGGAN, A Student’s Textbook in the History of Edu- 
cation, New York, 1916, 7-14. 
Short. Apparently based on secondary authorities. 


P. E. KRETZMANN, Education among the Jews from the Earli- 

est Times to the End of the Talmudic Period, Boston, 1916. 

A curious work. In a scurrilous preface, the author at- 

tacks ‘“‘the vain mutterings of foolish criticism’? and the 

“inane theory of a so-called evolution.’? The author's ig- 

norance is equal to his fanaticism. A glance at his bibli- 
ography (p. 98) shows his scanty preparation. 


INDEX 


A H 
Arithmetic, 26. Happiness, 6, 11. 
Art educ., 29, 17. Herbartians, ix, 
Astronomy, 20. Home educ., 32. 
Ath-bash, xi. House work, 19. 

C 1 


Canaanite influence, 2, 26. JTmportance of Heb. Ed., x. 
Catechetical methods, 45. 


Character formation, ix. L 

D Legal educ., 28. 
Dancing, 20. Levites, 22. 
Derwishes, 34. Literary criticism, xvii. 
Discipline, 38-42. Locke, 58. 

E M 
Exile, 4, 24. . 
Ezra, 24, Manual labor, 28. 


Marriage, 10-11. 

RF Merchants, 21,34. 
Method, general, 42-44. 
Methods, special, 44. 
Monotheism, 5, 15. 


Family life, 30-33. 
Festivals, 20, 44. 





Filial duties, 13. Mother, 10. 13. 31, 32. 
G 

Games, 28. N 

Geography, 48. National educ., xv, 50. 

Geometry, 27. Nature study, 42-43. 


Girls, eduec. of, 17 Nomadic life, 1, 5, 19. 


Index 65 


O 
Obedience, 40. 


1 


Phonics, 45. 

Priests, 34. 

Prophets, 3, 4, 6, 11, 15, 22, 
23, 33. 

Proverbs, 42. 

Psychology, 12-13. 


R 


Reading, 38 41, 45-48, 51- 
as 

Renaissance, 57. 

Respect to parents, 13. 

Results, 49. 

Righteousness, 3, 6. 

Rousseau, 59. 


NS) 
Salaries, 36. 
Schematic Survey, xx. 
Schools, 4, 33. 
Seribes, 3, 5, 21. 
Sheikh, 14. 
Slavery, 49. 
Socialism, ix. 
Soul, 49. 
Squatting posture, 48. 
Stories, 19. 


it 
Teachers, 34-35. 
Types of educ., 60. 
V 


Vocational psychology, 20, 
pial ha 
W 
Writing, 33. 





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